Hello. First of all - I'm new to Poser and hopefully someone will help out so I won't get mad anymore. I've done few renders so far that I'm satisfied with, I learn quickly and have real pleasure from Poser BUT - does it have to take so long to render final image? I'm talking about characters only as I've only focused on them for now, saved out as png files.

I run Poser 8 on Windows 7 32bit with Intel Dual Core 3.2 GHz and 3 GB RAM. I can't make you screen from my settings as Poser is rendering now >_< but I have a question for best settings for Firefly. Probably I could have more RAM but it's not possible now so if anyone knows how to make Poser work a bit faster it would be great. Thanks in advance :)

When PC's are slowing down, first run a good utility to clean the system.

Advanced System Care free from iobit. free
Glary Utilities free
Winutilities, free
All offer one click solutions that are very good to optimise a system.
Please do not use Norton as anti virus.

Render settings?

Cast shadows ON
Raytracing ON
Raytrace bounces 2-3
Indirect Light ON
Irradiance caching 0 - 30
Indirect Light Quality 7
Pixel samples 3-5
Min shading rate 0.5
Bucket size 32
Smooth Plygons As required
Use displacement maps => If you use a displacement map somewhere
Poset filter size 3
Post filter type sinc

With little RAM you can set Render in a separate Process in the General preferences.

Oh almost forgot. Windows 7?
Buy a fast 4GB SD card if you have a SD card slot and use the Windows 7 Readyboost option to speed up your machine.
If no SD card slot, you can do the same with a fast 4GB USB stick.

The SD card or stick can be bigger then 4GB, but Readyboost has a max of 4GB.

Euh, Readyboost can handle up to 4 devices of 4GB , so a combination of a SD card and USB sticks works too.

Happy Posering
Tony

How long do you consider long?

I remember doing simple ray traced renders over night, 12 hours long.

In a nutshell , typically the more advanced best looking render options, the longer the rendertime. You in most cases sacrifice quality for speed.

Quote - .

I run Poser 8 on Windows 7 32bit with Intel Dual Core 3.2 GHz and 3 GB RAM. 

..... Probably I could have more RAM but it's not possible now so if anyone knows how to make Poser work a bit faster it would be great. Thanks in advance :)

32 bit systems do not address more than 3 GB of RAM.  Adding more will not improve situation.

Other variables, displacement and bump maps present, number of light in the scene, hi res textures, hi poly meshes, transmaps, crazy render settings all contribute to long render times.  Overnight is not atypical.

raytrace bounce can be reduced to 1 if you dont use reflect/refract.

Reduce your postfilter to 2

Sorry
Raytrace bounces can not be reduced to 1 if you are rendering with IDL
2 is the minimum for IDL

And with IDL
Render with as few lights as possible
With IDL you do not need all those lights that where required to make Poser 7 look half decend.

I allways render with IDL and only ONE single infinite light inside bb's sphere.
And allways I have to reduce the light to 60-70%.

I'm talking about raytrace bounce, not idl bounce ;)

Euh ???? Me too :-)

"Raytrace bounces can not be reduced to 1 if you are rendering with IDL as 2 is the minimum for IDL calculations in Poser8."

In my proposed render settings;
I put IDL to ON, so I need al least 2 Raytrace Bounces in Poser8.

Post filter can go to 2.

But the settings above give the best mix of render time versus output quality.

If you need better quality, render times become exponentionally longer.

Hum ... J'ai dit une connerie ...

You're right, 2 is a minimum.

Thank you for coming back.
Merci.

Quote - Hum ... J'ai dit une connerie ...

 

You're right, 2 is a minimum.

Hm, are you sure? I just tried with 1, and it works for me. I can even turn it down to 0 (but then i will not see any effect of it). And 1 gives the greatest effect for the  smallest waiting time.

Quote - raytrace bounce can be reduced to 1 if you dont use reflect/refract.

If you are not using reflect/refract then the bounce means nothing and can be set to any value with no difference in speed. If there are zero bounces attempted, the limit is never reached, therefore setting this limit has no importance at all.

If you are using reflect, but there is only one place to bounce, then it also does not matter what the bounce limit is - you can never reach it if there is no second or third place to bounce off of.

etc.

In your general preferences, do you have render to a separate process checked and 4 threads?

Hi

How large a render and how long are you talking about?

If I set Firefly on the standard "Final" render setting with a clothed character a background cloth pane, a fog plane and render at 1600 by 900 it takes about 2 to 3 minutes to render an image.

Just a clothed full standing figure takes about 45 seconds.

At low settings but with shadows about 10 seconds.

Is that the kind of time you are talking about, or are you seeing times a lot longer then that? 

Mike

Add reflections, refraction, a lot of glass and water, IDL, single point liight, 3 bounces, I7 at 3.06GHZ and I'm looking at 20 minutes or thereabout.

Oh, and add about 70 megs for some huge texture maps probably isn't helping.

hi Nakatoni,

back to your original question. There is a memory-thing and a CPU-thing.

By tweaking the render settings as mentioned above, you can limit the burden on your CPU and you'll get your results faster. Those settings do hardly effect memory usage, so more mem won't help much in this case. IDL might require more mem, but not to an extent that makes it an issue.

When your scene gets too large, your mem will become the bottleneck. As a guideline: a typical scene takes 500-700Mb plus 500-700Mb for each hires (Vicky-like) character. A 32 bit application in a 32 bit environment can handle up to 2Gb user-mem only but can be set to use 3Gb instead (I did a tutorial on that, it's here at Rendo). When exceeding those limits your application will just fall over and you will need to shift to 64-bit stuff. When your machine can't offer the amount of ram, it will use virtual mem and might start disk-swapping. This will delay your rendering enormously.

So, when you hit long render times, the first thing to figure out is: is it CPU or is it mem? Taskmanager might become of help, when in doubt.

PS/1: most system cleanup will not help speed up your renders except killing your anti-virus stuff, Norton, AVG, whatever. IMHO the MS Security Essentials don't effect machine performance.

PS/2: what's long?

• 2011: recent Vue scene, 7000x5000 in Vue (Broadcast Quality) in a 990X@4Ghz (8 threads) took 50 hours.

• 2009: older 7000x5000 Bryce scene took 200 hours, single frame,  (http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2148371&user_id=378571&member&np) on quad-core@2.4GHz

 - 2003: reflection intensive 6000 frame (4 mins) short, DVD-framesize, took 42 days @ 24hr/day on a 4-CPU@2GHz renderfarm (Cinema4D)

so great render periods are: during lunch, during dinner, during sleep en during office hours (if there are any).

have fun.

Keeping a PC clean will always increase its performance.
Using an antivirus that uses less memory will always increase a PC's performance. (Compared to a memeory hungry anti-virus)

Doing good housekeeping will also maintain system performance.
Keep the registry clean and organised.

Limiting facter, as you rightfully mentioned is RAM for 32 bit systems.

Whan can also help?
Use readyboost for Windows 7;
Have an SD card slot?
Put a fast SD card in it and set it up for Windows7 readyboost.
Have some Fast USB sticks, and also set them up for readyboost.
Windows 7 can use up to 4 devices with 4GB each for readyboost.

Even my high end system, (as all my systems) have 3 USB slots filled with USB sticks on readyboost. (+ the SD card, makes 4X4 is 16GB available for readyboost.)

When HD swapping?
Only 2 sollutions possible. Reduce Poly count or reduce texture size.

Or render at slightly less settings.

I agree with Tony on house keeping, it really does speed everything up

and another trick after twiking the settings is to close Poser and turn the computer off for around 10 seconds (flushes stuff out of RAM that Poser put there along with other programs).  Then start it up again, load Poser and your scene and begin rendering.

That works for me almost every time.  Jan

Guys, guys, guys! Thanks so much for your replies. Been away for a while but I've read everything.

So first things first. So far I'm rendering only characters, with clothes, hair etc. and 3-4 light sources. I've done also renders with simple lights then I might be using just two lights. Whatever. When I say long rendering time I mean approx. 10 hours for not so detailed image. I found out what caused problems - IDL. THIS devil is causing Poser rendering for hours and hours and hours. I like the effect of using IDL but does it really have to take so long precalculating?

I have Firefly set to separate process with 2 threads, should I increase threads number?

Here are my settings. With them, rendering image in 3000x3061px 300dpi takes approx. 15-20minutes. This I can accept...

I'm working on laptop with NVidia GEForce 9600 GT graphic card and I heard it can give support to 3D applications, am I correct?

Thanks once again :) Now I'm off to new topic (don't want to mess up this one, gotta keep threads separately :) )

Laptops really are not rendering power houses.

You set the number or render threads to the number of cores your processor has, but honestly, odds are its because you are trying to do processor intense work with just a laptop.

So if I have a "quad core," I should set the number of render threads to 4?

For some reason, it's set to 8.  I don't think I changed it.  Will that cause bad things to happen?  Should I change it to 4?

For a quad set it to4
For a hypertreated quad set it to 8
or 7, and keep one for background process.

@nakatoni

You say 3-4 lights.

Are you rendering with IDL AND an IBL light?
Do able but generally not such a good idea speed wise.

Thanks.  I think I'm hyper-threaded, so I guess that's why it was set to 8. 

And yeah, IDL and IBL are not a good combo.  You can grow old and die waiting for it to render...assuming it doesn't choke on the memory requirements.

Quote - Laptops really are not rendering power houses.

 

True but I don't complain :) Set up properly it can do really powerful things (at least my machine can do) not just browse internet LOL. Desktop is far future for me so I try to do my best with what I've got. Anyways, I'll see what I can come up with after I've read here. Hopefully I'll spend less time lurking around while Poser's working XD

@vilters - I don't use IDL and rarely use AO

Take into consideration, IDL calculates for every light and self illuminating object present in the scene.  This means that you must evaluate all your material zones on every character/object and adjust Diffuse_values to less than 1 and turn off every ambient channel unless the particular object is intended to emit light.  It may seem to be quite a bit of work to render a simple scene, but it is becoming more essential to scrutinize materials closely on older content and content created for earlier Poser versions. 

Hi

My setup.

i7 2.93 Ghx

ATI Radeon 5870 video card

8 Gigs of ram.

24" monitor with a native resolution of 1920 by 1200.

I rendered this image a few minutes ago. I opened the image of your settings that you posted side by side with my Poser window and moved all the settings to match yours, in many cases this is lower then I normally use.

It took less then 2 minutes at 1600 by 900 to render this image including the indirect lighting.

It has one figure fully clothed, 2 cloth panes, (the stone wall is separate and ahead of the church) and four lights. 

Plus some transparency maps.  This is frame 250 of a 250 frame video clip.

She walks through the gate, from behind the wall, that's why it's separate.

There just isn't any way it should take hours unless your computer is having some sort of issue.

One thing I have noticed is that Poser is sensitive to fragmentation.

I use Defraggler because it will let you defrag specific files and I have seen it make the difference between whether it will complete creating a video file or not.

I can't guess what the problem with your computer could be but I'd start by running Malwarebytes, CCleaner and Deffragler.

Then make sure all your drivers are up to date.

Mike

Ps.

After reading your post again I boosted the size of my image up to 3000 by 2250 and that extended the render time to 4 minutes and 20 seconds with IDL turned on.

With is off time dropped to 3 minutes plus a little.

I'm willing to bet your processor is a hell of a lot faster than the one in her laptop.

Laptops are great for portible computing, but unless you spend 5 grand on them, they are really not meant for 3d application rendering.

Yeah, if you dumb things down enough they can render in a reasonable time, but the result you are going to get are going to look like things from poser 5 or less, without any of the oh, WOW! great rendering options.

That said, thats why you have the render que. Setup your renders, send them to the que, and then just let them render while you sleep. Thats what we used to do in the old days when computers weren't that powerful.

I remember rendering a glass sphere on a checkerboard floor, and the render taking almost two days. I set it up friday night, and it was done around mid day on sunday.

I remember those days too! LOL

Things were so slow, it's hard to believe now, but I can remember when it used to take an hour to do some effect on a photo in Photoshop.

My first computer had a 25 hz processor and Windows 3.1.

There's no getting around the fact that Poser probably puts the most stress on my computer of anything I run.

One thing she could do that would help is not render at such large sizes, I seldom do anything bigger the 1920 by 1200, the resolution of my monitor.

I don't know what she's doing with them, but you can't see anything on your monitor that is larger then your monitor's resolution.

I.e. if you are viewing a whole image, and your monitor resolution is 1600 by 900, a 4000 pixel wide image is going to look basically the same on it.

The computer just can't show anything higher.

Mike